Medal of Honor review

The Success Fisherman Posted on October 10, 2010

Medal of Honour citation: Sergeant First Class xSN1PERRx, pretend videogame army, distinguished himself with actions not quite above the Call of Duty while serving in Afghanistan as a super-secret megasoldier operating in a hush-hush ‘Tier One’ unit, sometimes switching brains to become a frontline grunt who learned about the futility of war and stuff like that.

Sergeant xSN1PERRx spent eight hours trudging around a geographically accurate but worryingly beige combat zone in southern Afghanistan. While on duty dressed in the skin of both Tier One operators and Army Ranger, he was ambushed repeatedly by infinite streams of Taliban fighters. Facing their withering assault, Sergeant xSN1PERRx was able to identify and click on each of their heads in turn until they fell down and their bodies disappeared.

“In 30 yards, turn left at the giant explosion.”

Sergeant SN1PERRx willingly gave his life, choosing to hurl himself into a room waving a shotgun after his teammates told him to hang back, because he was bored of staring at yet another brown rock. His extraordinary badassishness and mouse-wielding ability are in keeping with the highest traditions of videogame service and reflect great credit upon himself, and acceptable credit on Medal of Honour’s developers. Now he’s dead, 75%. OMGLOL.

Blood and tiers

Let’s take a moment to salute our fallen brother. Have you saluted your magazine? Good. Medal of Honour is very strict about that kind of thing. It’s a shooter made with the close involvement of real-life soldiers: special forces so classified that before the game was released, publishers EA could only show them off with their faces hidden and their voices masked. Their input was intended to give the game a sense of respect and understanding for the soldiers involved.

“I WANT CRISPS AND POP GO GO GO.”

It’s a fine line to walk, ruminating on the nature of the warrior in a game about inserting digital bullets in skulls, and MoH stumbles regularly. At times, it goes mawkish, the overt sentimentality of years of battlefield cooperation squidged into an ill-fitting shooter template. There are a lot of cod-meaningful man-glances that feel forced, busting in on your good shootin’ time with slow-paced cinematics.

On the other side, attempts to even the conflict and move it away from goodies vs baddies are undermined by a black and white approach. Almost every soul who lives in the game’s southern Afghan region of Takur Ghar takes potshots at you within milliseconds of you arriving in their area; those that don’t are goats. If Medal of Honour’s enemy count is even vaguely accurate, the coalition forces in Afghanistan are outgunned seven hundred to one. New fighters pop into existence every couple of seconds in the game’s lengthy and repeated ‘defend until extraction’ objectives. These vignettes are tense but tiresome: in a real battle they’d be frantic scraps for seconds of life; in Medal of Honour, they’re click click click from behind the same point of cover until a timer ticks down to zero.

Sniper scopes make normal mode too easy.

But damn, if I didn’t get suckered in. The first section of the game is in the secret shoes of Tier One operators, and feels resolutely retro in its approach: four men versus the world. Halfway in, you get control of an Army Ranger – a more typical grunt. Before, I was an extension of the nighttime scenery, silently killing in the dark. In the combat boots of the Ranger, the rocks and dust of Afghanistan itself seemed to want to kill me, twatting mortar strikes and RPG fire into my landing point. My helicopter ride downed, I felt a minuscule approximation of the confusion and panic EA’s co-opted soldiers mentioned in their pre-game primers. For a short while following that ambush, every “OO-RAH!” that I’d otherwise have winced at became a statement of intent, every kill-shot a revenge strike for the unfair murder of my pretend buddies. Much more and I’d have broken out whooping “USA! USA!” Tough to explain to the office. By the time I was stuck in the bed of a valley with my Ranger squad, tributaries of Taliban forming a river of pissed-off militants, I’d lost my cynical critical connection, and was genuinely wishing for evacuation. I didn’t want to die in the dust.

That was a high point. Prior to the stand in the desert, Medal of Honour isn’t sure what it is. The first segment of Tier One missions are Call of Duty rejects, cod-CoD gimmicks that get used once or twice then tossed. As decreed by ancient law or something, I was forced to direct shots fired by everyone’s favourite military namedrop, God’s own giant fucking plane o’guns – an AC130. I aimed a screen-filling sniper-rifle repeatedly, puncturing heads from a kilometre away as my spotter called out targets in a watered down version of Modern Warfare’s silky ‘one shot, one kill’ mission. When MoH isn’t trying to ape its peers, it fares a lot better.